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Fall Face Off is approaching fast! We have many teams signing up in both divisions and want them to be prepared. Events 1 & 2 are listed below with brief descriptions of each. Athletes will be briefed at the event in great detail, but please feel free to contact us with questions or concerns. The fourth and final WOD will be announced the day of the competition.

This WOD is a combination of some of James McDermotts favorite exercises.

“Prowler and Snatch Relay”

For Time:

Prowler Push 200ft

4 Snatches

Prowler Push 300ft

3 Snatches

Prowler Push 400ft

2 Snatches

Prowler Push 500ft

1 Snatch

*Low handles down high handles back

*Weights RX Prowler 195/175/145/95

RX Snatch 95/115/145/195

*Weights Scaled Prowler 145/125/105/75

Scaled Snatch 75/95/115/145

*Includes weight of the Prowler

In this event the first team member will push the prowler down and back and then perform 4 snatches. The team will then load the bar to the next highest weight from the prowler and the second team member will go. This relay continues until the last team member completes their lift or time expires.

This event was created by Jason Murphy and enhanced by the coaching staff.

“Cumulatively Complex”

Max cumulative weight

&

Max complex weight in 12 minutes

8 Deadlifts

6 Hang Power Cleans

4 Front Squats

2 Jerks

In this event there are two scores. One score for the heaviest successful complex and one for the most accumulated weight. Each team will be given a bar, a stack of weight and 12 minutes. Each team member must complete one section of the complex. Every full complex competed will count toward the team’s cumulative weight total. The bar may not touch the ground between movements during the complex.

Fall Face Off is approaching and in the coming weeks we will release more information about this event to keep you informed.

Judging Standards:

Fall Face Off we will be following CrossFit Games standards for all movements unless otherwise specified. Our Head Judge Desire Treski is one of the most experienced judges in the Northeast with four years of experience officiating at regionals.

Divisions:

RX Division:The RX division is designed for athletes with a strong foundation in CrossFit workouts and to test them across all of the domains of fitness. RX teams should expect to see movements such as Muscle Ups, Handstand Push Ups, Pistols, Rope Climbs, Snatches @185/115, Clean and Jerk @ 225/155, Double Unders and be able to hit WODs RX. Not all team members are required to hit these standards.

Scaled Division:The Scaled division is designed to give athletes a taste for competition and allow them to challenge themselves in a fun way. Scaled teams should expect to see scaled versions of the above movements. Examples would be Ring Rows instead of Pull Ups or Push Ups instead of Handstand Push Ups.

This event is straight from the mind of Coach Chris Anderson and the CrossFit Games. Expect this endurance event to tax your patience and teamwork.

Event 3: “Burden Run”

For Time:

1000ft Run (500ft Scaled)

80 Alternating Lunges

1000ft Run (500ft Scaled)

60 Ground To Over Head

1000ft Run (500ft Scaled)

40 Squats

1000ft Run (500ft Scaled)

20 Burpees

1000ft Run (500ft Scaled)

*250ft down 250ft back

*Weights RX 45/25 Scaled 35/15

In this event teams will complete all of the movements as a group in unison. All teammates will carry a plate for the run, lunges and squats. Athletes will move the plate from the ground to overhead and perform burpees to the plate. The plate may be carried in any manner.

We have seen some truly wonderful things occur in our small community. Countless goals have been achieved as members step outside their comfort zones to build healthier lives and many new meaningful relationships have been formed. That is the true beauty of what we do at Albany CrossFit. It is not about the barbells loaded with heavy weight, wall balls sitting patiently under their targets or even all those damn burpees we have done over the years. It is about the cheering as the last person finishes their workout, the support given when someone we know is in need and the high fives after the chalk dust has settled. As we have grown and learned together our community has undergone many changes. Together we have knocked down walls, welcomed new members to our family and said goodbye to those who have moved on to other adventures in their lives.

Recently, as many of you are probably aware of we have said goodbye to Albany CrossFit founder Jason Ackerman. Jason started our beloved gym in just one racket ball court filled with very little equipment, but has now moved on to other endeavors. A few weeks ago he sold Albany CrossFit to Court Club owner Shye Evan. Shye plans to build upon the standard of excellence set by our coaching staff in order to not only continue to nurture our great community, but to help it continue to live long and prosper as well… Before we delve into the exciting changes that will be occurring at Albany CrossFit lets learn a little bit about Shye Evan first. Shye has been managing the Court Club since 2001. He regularly teaches classes such as Pilates, Body Pump and In-Door Cycling which allow him to showcase his passion for fitness. He also coaches squash and racquet ball in addition to being quite a skilled athlete in those sports. Shye loves to teach and offers introductory lessons to people who have an interest in learning these sports. You can find Shye at the Court Club everyday with his Basset Hound Louie (Coach Louie) either greeting you as you walk in or helping someone pursue their fitness goals. Shye’s office door is always open and he encourages members to seek him out any time with questions or concerns.

Shye has a vision to make the Court Club and Albany CrossFit the premier fitness facility in the Capital District. He has been working diligently with the coaching staff at our gym to help him make this vision a reality. Some changes that will be occurring over the next few weeks to enhance our community are outlined below.

Upgraded Memberships:

This is truly an exciting time to be a member at Albany CrossFit. Now that Albany CrossFit and the Court Club are under the ownership of Shye Evan you will now have access to the following at no additional charge:

The Courts: So you can play Racquet Ball, Squash, Badminton, Volley Ball or Handball anytime you want!

The Free Weight Room: Crowded in the CrossFit spaces? Then head upstairs where you can use a Squat Rack for strength movements, Nautilis machines for accessory work or even just to stretch out.

Rock Climbing…Need I say more!

Attend Any of the Following Fitness Classes:

Body Pump

Cardio Boxing

High / Low (Interval Training)

In Door Cycling

Pilates

Yoga

Zumba

Silver Sneakers (Coached by our very own Dona Wildove!)

CrossFit Programming:

The coaching staff at Albany CrossFit; feel that the programming offered by CompetitorsTraining.com is great for improving general fitness and for those who want to participate in the Sport aspect of CrossFit alike. We do however plan to make some modifications to help us offer you a better experience in class with this programming.

Effective Monday, September 8th we will begin following Competitors WOD a week behind. This will allow our coaches to review entire week’s worth of programming so they can better prepare for classes. During the week of Monday 9/1 to Saturday 9/6 we will be running WODs hand picked by the Coaching Staff.

Function & Sport: In addition to following Competitors WOD a week behind we plan to offer two variations of the programming to better suit the needs of our varied gym population.

Function: This section of the programming will be geared towards individuals who are trying to be fit for life. It will mimic both the intensity and desired stimulus of the Sports programming, but the movements and other aspects of the WOD might be slightly different. These will not be scaled or watered down workouts. They will be challenging and still require scaling like any other WOD would.

Sport: This section of the programming will follow Competitors WOD as closely as possible, but at times may be altered to fit our gym in regards to equipment, space and time in the hour. It is intended for individuals who are active in the sports aspect of CrossFit and have built a solid foundation of technical proficiency in various movements such as the Snatch, Clean & Jerk, or Muscle Ups for example.

Example of Sports & Function Programming:

Sport WOD

Function WOD

“Tequila Montoya”

3 Rounds For Time of:

400m Run

21 Pull Ups

12 Hang Squat Snatch (95/65)

* 20 Minute Time Cap

“Helen”

3 Rounds For Time of:

400m Run

21 Kettlebell Swings (53/35)

12 Pull Ups

* 20 Minute Time Cap

Here is an example of a Sport WOD vs. a Function WOD. Both will be visible on the WODify page every day. Athletes in each class will be hitting one or the other. Both WODs are difficult, will require scaling, but still provide the intended stimulus of the given day.

Schedule Changes:

The following changes are being made to the schedule due to low attendance. We want to be as fair as possible with how we utilize the space in our gym during busy times of the day. These changes will allow those who wish to work on aspects of their fitness outside of class more time to do so.

Sundays: Going forward the 10:00am class will no longer be featured on the schedule. Instead Sunday will be used in its entirety as an Open Gym day where members can come in and work on whatever they wish. Please keep in mind however Strongman Class at Noon is still on the schedule and have priority in the Triple if they need it. Coach Cat is very strong…so be weary of crossing her.

5 PM Fitness: With the new improvements made to the programming the Fitness class at 5:00pm will no longer be held. This will also allow more open gym time during the day.

All of us on the coaching staff are working very hard to offer every member the best experience possible. Please be patient with us as we undergo this revitalization period in the gym. We are committed to helping every one of you (Be)tter and make these changes to improve the community. In the future we have many exciting plans to implement that we know you will all love and enjoy. If you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to email us at info@albanycrossfit.com and we will respond as quickly as possible.

This coming labor day we will be hosting our fifth annual Stephen Smolinksi memorial WOD. Stephen was more than just an athlete at our gym. He was a caring husband to Joy Smolinski of CrossFit Beyond, a loving father to Stacey Smolinski and a dear friend to many in our community. The beautiful thing about the CrossFit community is how its members stand by one another through not only tough workouts, but life’s tragedies as well. Help us support Joy and Stacey as we remember Stephen.

Important Information

This event will begin at 10:00am Monday September 1st (Labor Day)

No other classes will be held at Albany CrossFit on this day.

Albany CrossFit members: Please sign up for this event in WODify.

Any and all visitors from other boxes are more than welcome to participate. Please arrive early to sign our gyms waiver.

If you had a chance to watch the Games on Saturday you might have found yourself yelling ‘Up’ ‘Up’ ‘Up’ to the TV in a rallying cry of support from the depths of your living room as you witnessed the prowess and sheer grit from athletes like Cody Anderson or Lauren Brooks as they worked their way through the Clean Speed Ladder. Down to the final pull these athletes dug in and dug deep, through the last push to stand they battled back against buckling knees and caving chest. I like to imagine they were repeating to themselves that familiar mantra we all know too well, ‘Elbows UP!’ until that last moment when they miraculously stand up against the steel, buoyed by the cheers of 25,000 fans.

Back home, far away from the roar of 25,000 fans and the California sun it’s just us and our local community. Showing up, beating back the buckle and doing the work to get the weight off the floor. The weights may vary but the struggle is the same. If you’re a CrossFitter, you’ve been there – whether in Albany, or Carson or in your garage. As CrossFitters, that is the tie that binds us.

Rich Froning or Julie Foucher are pretty to watch but back here on planet earth that’s not my main reason as to why I continue to choose CrossFit. Yes, they are spectacular athletes on an ever-expanding stage whom collectively we watch in awe and admiration. But ultimately, what motivates is the people right here in our own community. You may not have formally met that athlete next to you in the triple but you see them each morning and as they work on their pull-ups and refuse to quit during the most brutal of WODs and you feel happy when they go to add extra weight to their back squat. Maybe that person is a newer athlete whose form needs a lot of work (whose doesn’t?) but they keep trying, just like you and me. That’s really all that matters. Isn’t it? Each of us chipping away at what’s inside and out, our goals, our battles, our personal challenges, our dreams. WODs are symbolic of life. CrossFit not only gives the physical but the mental tools to navigate and keep going. The Games are spectacular but personally I’ll take a 3pm on a Thursday at ACF with athletes like Dona, or TJ, or Woody as my own personal form of what truly motivates. How about you?

We all have had days where we are so sore that we can’t even think about working out. Maybe the day before we did Karen and now your legs are looking at your stairs as if they are Mount Everest. It is important on these days that we try to stay active. In order to help speed up our recovery we must get our blood flowing at a faster rate and our lymph system in gear. When we work out our core body temperature rises, blood flow rate increases, and muscular contractions get the lymphatic system in gear. The job of the lymphatic system is to collect potentially harmful substances and to filter them before sending them back into the blood stream. The job of blood is to carry nutrients to our muscles and to get rid of any waste (bi-products) that we may have accumulated during our workout. Without going in to great depth on these systems, I hope you can see the importance of how these two systems can improve our recovery. Even though you may feel like exercising more will be the death of you, it will actually help you in your recovery. This is where you have to be smart about what exercises you do. Below I have listed just a few things you can do that will help promote a faster recovery.

Every year I look forward to watching the CrossFit Games. I probably look forward to the Games more than NCAA Nationals for gymnastics, which now seems strange to me. Both are only on once per year. Both are sports that I love. Gymnastics was my only love for 16 years, and only being able to watch it on tv once a year was like torture for me as a kid! I looked up to the girls competing immensely, and I always wished I could be just like them one day. Now that I’m 27 years old (ancient in gymnastics years), I see gymnastics differently. I watch it to appreciate the sport, and see how it is evolving. CrossFit, however, I see in a completely different light. They are competing in the same sport that we do at ACF every day. I watch the Games athletes, and I am able to compare myself to them. Sure, their Fran times are twice as fast as mine, but I know that I can do that same workout that they’re doing, whether it’s scaled or as prescribed. Because of this, I am inspired and motivated by everyone on tv at the Games.

Another reason why I love watching CrossFit is seeing the camaraderie between athletes who are competing against each other. You hear it all the time from the commentators- “it’s always the athlete that finishes last who gets the loudest cheers.” I love that aspect of our sport. You would never see that happen in gymnastics, or probably any other sport. Rich Froning, 4-time Fittest Man in the World, cheers for every single athlete he can, even though all of them are trying to take his title from him. What?! Cheer on the people trying to beat you? I love this about CrossFit! You’ll see the top athletes giving pointers to their competition before an event has started, and encouraging each other. I think this is what makes our sport the best, and it is something that we can all take away from watching the Games every year.

Let’s all try to be more like Games athletes, not only in work ethic, but in the way that they support each other. Cheer loud for your friends in the gym who are still trying to finish a WOD, even though you are completely dead from having just finished it yourself. Help someone who may be struggling with a certain movement, even if it means they’ll end up with a better score than you. With our fast-growing box, I think we sometimes lose sight of the community that we have at ACF. So, let’s all use each other to be better athletes, and more importantly- be better people.

For anyone who knows me or goes to the early morning WODs, you know that at times I fall off the wagon hard with my eating paleo and attendance at WODs. It’s not something I actively plan for, in fact every time I do it, I tell myself “never again”. Despite me telling myself “never again, it still happens every now and again. I have a few busy days at work and can’t make it in, I do a little too much volume and have to take a few extra rest days to ease and overused body part, or maybe it’s just a nice summer day and I want to eat a burger and relax with an adult beverage of choice. That’s how it starts, then one bad decision leads to another, then another and so on…Before I know it, my belt is fitting tighter, I’m moving slower, and those wall balls I used to breeze through now feel like I’m hurling a ball of concrete.

Enter in the memories and current viewings of the Crossfit games. Hello motivation and inspiration overload. Just watching the top tier athletes compete at the level they do makes me want to stop what I’m doing and start doing burpees. That’s not a joke, it just makes me want to workout. When I see them doing a skill that I generally suck at and they are doing it so easily, it reminds me that at one point they had to work hard to obtain that skill and work exponentially harder to master it at their current level. In fact, that is how I got unbroken double unders. In the summer of 2012 I was on vacation with my family and we were watching re-runs of previous games workouts. One of the WOD’s had double unders and I remember how effortlessly the athletes were just jumping up and down doing insane amounts of unbroken doubles, their faces looked like they were getting rest time in while doing this. Well, some of them anyway. At that time I was just getting back into shape from some time off recovering from shoulder surgery. I said that when I get back home I am going to get unbroken doubles. When I got home, I worked every day on my doubles and before I knew it, I was stringing unbroken doubles together. I kept working on them and now doubles are often times my strongest skill in a WOD.

Also along the lines of motivation is how strict the games athletes must be throughout the rest of the year. We all probably know that Rich Froning was once again the male games champ. Looking at the other names on the leader board and the podiums, a very high percentage of them are all repeat games athletes. One can only imagine the kind of strict eating, training, and planning it must take to achieve and maintain that level of fitness. For many of them, certain slip ups on clean eating and/or workout regimens may very well mean the difference between watching the games at home or watching the games from the eyes of an athlete on the rig. When I feel myself falling into a slump of eating crap food or taking the easy way out, I think of this and force myself to eat a paleo meal or get into a class and as one bad decision often leads to another, one good decision more often leads to another. This helps me stay on track and feeling fitter and better.

During the month of July there was a special kind of excitement in the air at ACF. The games were upon us! The Super Bowl of our sport was about to begin! Most of our athletes were buzzing with the excitement and anticipation of the crowning of the next fittest man and woman on earth.

In the days leading up to the crossfit games I paid very close attention to what was happening at our box. Most classes started with a mention of the games during our briefings at the white board. Most athletes appeared inspired by a discussion of the games and the athletes that were competing in them. You could see that enthusiasm in their faces when the coaches speculated about what the WODs might be and who would perform the best.

But I also saw many athletes with blank faces, athletes who didn’t seem at all interested in the Games or a discussion of them.

These are People who I made a point of speaking to later. “Will you be watching the games?” I asked several of our members. To my surprise, several people said no. At first I was shocked!

“You’re not going to spend four days glued to your computer and a wi-fi network to watch

people do what you do everyday?”

I was confused, it made no sense. It was like playing softball your entire life and not watching the world series………

Except that I’ve played softball my whole life and I hate watching major league baseball. And to be honest, I don’t much like watching the games either. It was kind of liberating to know that I am not the only person who doesn’t like to watch the games. I used to think that there was something wrong with me, that I was less of a crossfitter because I could care less if Rich Froning won for the fourth straight year.

So I thought about it. What does this disinterest in the Games mean? Does it mean that the athletes who choose not to watch don’t care about our ACF community? Does it mean that they are not dedicated to their personal crossfit journey?

Of course it doesn’t.

There are many members at ACF that come to our box day in and day out, that leave their heart and soul in the image of a perfect sweat angel on the floor. These are people that are dedicated and irreplaceable members of our community. Yet, they have no idea who Rich Froning or Annie T are. And frankly, like me, they don’t care. And that is ok.

That’s the beauty of our community. It is diverse. All of us have different goals and different priorities- for some that includes being a spectator and an athlete. For others, we are just happy being athletes who get to be a part of an amazing community that supports each other both inside and outside of the box. What is important, what matters, and what connects us all so deeply is that for the hour that we are working, side by side, we are all engaged in the same undertaking- to finish the workout and then to help our fellow athletes finish it as well.

This year I didn’t watch the games, but in honor of them and in honor of the sport of crossfit, something that has become such an important part of my life, I spent the time that I would have used to watch the games to hit double workouts and to take a long run. I also tried a new sport, and I got my sister, who has never crossfitted before, to hit a wod with me.